


missing half of me when we're apart

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: American Politics, Anal Sex, Domesticity, Future Fic, Getting Back Together, Happy Ending, Joseph Kavinsky Lives, M/M, Prokopenko (Raven Cycle) Lives, Rough Sex, Semi-Unhealthy Relationships, but i've been having a block, kind of, this probably doesn't even make any sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 08:37:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18807607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: There were many types of kings, and so there were many types of princes, though they all shared a thirst for greatness and rebellion, an abhorrence for anonymity and the mundane.Proko was no prince. He could not even fake it, play at being one like Parrish always could.(AKA, people get back together, Adam works for the President, and there are sexy results.)





	missing half of me when we're apart

**Author's Note:**

> I literally don't know what this is. I'm sorry that it's wild.

_ watched you throw out your bouquet _

_ now i think about you every day _

***

The bar was one he was no regular to, but he’d been invited out by a few of the doctoral students, and he still remembered when he’d been them, not so long ago. Only a handful of years separated him,  _ Dr. Ilya Prokopenko, Ph.D.,  _ from their ragged-sweatered cheap-vodka-drinking state. There was a band on the small stage, and the air felt close and hot. He had worn his work clothes, and did not notice K until he felt someone grasping him by the elbow and knew the touch so intimately that it stopped him dead in his tracks, made his heart stutter before he ever even turned around to  _ see.  _

“Proko,” K said, grown taller and more handsome, less gaunt, and Ilya thought for a half a second about running away, running out the doors and catching a cab to the airport and flying as far as he could get  _ away.  _ It was a futile sort of thought; K’s grip on his elbow was tight, and he had always been stronger than he looked, anyway. 

“K,” Ilya said, stricken, and allowed himself to be hugged casually, allowed K to press familiar kisses to his cheeks, allowed his feet to freeze to the floor instead of taking him far away. 

“Let’s step out for a smoke.” K said, and steered him out the side door. 

***

“I didn’t…” Ilya said, and closed his eyes, turning his face away so that it was half-shielded by shadow, the picture of strained grace. “I didn’t think I’d still feel like this.” K’s hands, greedy and with a mind of their own, crept beneath the hem of the jumper Ilya wore, seasonably-appropriate and somber plum in color, to lay flat against Ilya’s heart, which thundered. 

“Like what?” K asked, his mouth moving over Ilya’s unshadowed cheek, his eyelashes brushing Ilya’s skin. He smelt of soap and cigarettes. A different brand than he’d smoked as a teenager at Aglionby. Something sharper, crisper, more  _ artisanal tobacco  _ and less  _ cheap filtered menthol.  _

“Crazy.” Ilya murmured and turned his face quick so their lips met, their teeth clacking together uncomfortably. His hands were still at his sides, clenched into fists. “You make me  _ crazy.”  _

“I always did.” K returned on a gasp, and his hands dragged down, down, until they could curl into the waistband of Ilya’s wool trousers. He certainly looked the part of the professor, in his fine overcoat and oxfords, shirttails hanging out beneath his knitted jumper’s hem, glasses askew and hair sensibly cropped short, mussed nonetheless. He looked unbearably grownup. 

K felt a jarring dissonance in his chest when he realized that not only had Proko changed, but he had, too: no longer a skinny burnout, not a budding psychopath in cargo pants but a man grown, fully bloomed.  _ Blossomed.  _ Purpose had come upon him one morning not long after graduation, when he’d awoken with blood on his hands and bile stale on his tongue, horrified and electrified at the monster he’d become. Alone, abandoned, even by the most loyal of his creations. 

“I thought I’d grow out of it. Outgrow it. Outgrow  _ you.”  _ Ilya said, and knew his words were wounding but did not care. Or— knew and  _ cared,  _ but not enough. Perhaps that was his goal, to hurt K. K had spent a long time hurting the boy who had been Prokopenko. It made sense that the tables would be turned, now. 

“I made you,” K told him, a curious flatness to his tone that did not indicate whether he thought this a good or bad thing. It was only a thing, true and unchangeable. Unkind, but true. “You’ll  _ never _ be free of me.” 

“Which of us is the ghost?” Ilya retorted, vicious, but smeared their mouths together again, one hand clenching tight in the thick fabric of K’s leather jacket instead of staying with its twin at his side, passive. Initiating this, because it was something that had to be done. 

***

“Where’s your townie?” It came out badly, and Proko wished he’d not spoken at all, even as he wondered when he’d started referring to himself internally as  _ Proko  _ again. He’d taken care to become something else, once he’d shed the skin of Joseph Kavinsky’s whipping boy-slash-blowup doll. Looked in the mirror of his first meager apartment for hours, repeating  _ Ilya, Ilya, Ilya  _ to his reflection until it seemed something like natural. Had thought he’d bleached  _ Proko  _ out of his bones years ago. 

Had not expected to be this unnerved by Ronan Lynch, not so far removed from Aglionby and the years he’d spent choking to death on jealousy when they’d been schoolchildren, foolish and not aware that they’d been dead things walking, all of them. It hadn’t mattered how fast they could go in their screaming metal cocoons, how much they’d wanted to  _ touch,  _ how much hate had bubbled in their throats and spilled out like thorns from behind their teeth, berserkers and fiends. None of it mattered. They’d left it behind when they’d left Virginia behind, all of them, even the ones they’d left buried in fields and graveyards and memories. 

Ronan blinked at him, not as sharp as he’d been as a boy, but no less dangerous. He was no longer a shard of broken glass but a dagger, honed and sharpened into a thing of  _ intentional _ violence, rather than accidental maiming. Gone from a helplessly rabid dog to a prowling wolf, and it was a hatefully potent thing that leant a terrible ache to his already remarkable beauty. 

“Washington, probably,” Ronan shrugged, negligibly, and did not mean the state. Meant  _ wherever the president is.  _ President Gansey. What a thing. How right they’d all been, as little more than babbling children, to call Dick a  _ prince,  _ the sneered word worse than any swear. 

“And you’re left behind.” Proko concluded, casting about in the mysterious shadows that had always surrounded Ronan Lynch for purchase, trying to sink tenderhooks into a part of him that  _ hurt.  _

Ronan only shrugged, again, graceful to a fault, also cut from royal stock, and quirked a half-vicious, half-gentle smile. “I do alright.” He confessed, and flicked his gaze over Proko, mussed and  _ here,  _ drinking in a stuffy gentlemen’s club in the middle of the afternoon in New York City. The unspoken slight rang in Proko’s ears;  _ I am doing better than you are.  _

“Weren’t we all going to get out from under our fathers and their expectations?” Proko asked, still making a fool of himself. Still saying things he ought to swallow back, no matter that they fluttered madly against his tongue to escape like an angry swarm of bees. No matter that he had no father, not really; he was the copy of some New Jersey street rat that K had been foolish enough to lose to the grips of death and been fortunate enough to have the happy talent of  _ replacing.  _

Ronan knocked back the remainder of his drink, a snifter of some amber-colored liquor or another; the flex of his throat was terrible and beautiful, beneath the neatly-kept edges of his beard, which was as dark as the hair on his head, grown out from its adolescent buzzcut but only  _ just.  _

“Let’s go.” He said, shortly, and led the way without glancing behind to see if Proko followed, one discarded dog following another, cleaving to something like the mastering he’d been deprived of for so long. 

(So many cold years, spent with his books and his Xanax and, when the need got so bad it keened beneath his skin like a wounded animal, whatever heavy-handed bruiser he could pick up at the closest bar.) 

Ronan’s car was black, sleek, and very conspicuously  _ not  _ the BMW he’d rode like a demon through the Henrietta streets, leaving them all in his dust. Proko allowed himself to be surprised by this, dimly, even though it was ridiculous to be. It had been ten years since then, and any other young millionaire would’ve had ten new cars in the intervening space between  _ then  _ and  _ now.  _

It humanized Ronan, somehow, in a deeply discomfiting way that had Proko suddenly wrongfooted, stumbling a bit as he got into the passenger seat. 

(That could have been all the vodka, though.) 

He still drove like a demon, like he had a pack of screaming banshees on his back bumper, maneuvering slinkily through the near-standstill traffic with all of his limbs relaxed to the point of languidity. 

His apartment, too, was unlike anything Proko would’ve imagined, if he’d been given over to fantasizing  _ this,  _ a feat which would’ve required actual prophesying and no small amount of suspension of belief. All sleek lines, black leather sofas and black-tinted glass walls that boasted a view of the whole city, sprawling and filthy, beneath. It made Proko dizzy to do more than glance at. 

Ronan spared it not even half a second’s attention, instead striding down the hallway in a way that made it very clear he expected Proko either to follow or leave, and he didn’t care much which Proko chose. 

He was a demon in that room, where everything was dark and unknowable. Proko gasped a little raggedly when the door closed behind him, shivering and unmoored in the middle of the floor, until Ronan’s hands were upon him, hot-palmed and strong. 

He kissed like a demon, too, drugging passes of his lips and insistent scrapes of his teeth, beard prickly and unfamiliar on the rise of Proko’s Adam’s apple. 

If K were here, he’d be laughing. He’d be pushing between them, wrapping his hands around both their throats, pressing their mouths together to show that he  _ could,  _ and they’d  _ let him.  _ It would be so good. He’d tell them what to do. He’d snuffle, wet and overcome, at the back of Proko’s neck while Ronan fucked him the same way he was fucking Proko now, covering him with his entire body, broad-chested and sinuous-hipped, tall and heavy and  _ encompassing.  _

“Are you thinking about him, too?” Proko murmured, half-dreamy and half-afraid, knees drawn up almost to Ronan’s ribs and back sliding against Ronan’s sheets in a way that he knew would leave a blooming patch of friction burn, irritating even beneath his customary cashmere sweaters. Maybe he’d wear wool, so it would  _ hurt.  _

Ronan’s breath hitched; he shuddered, like an animal, and set his teeth into the meat of Proko’s shoulder.  _ Hard.  _ Like he really  _ was  _ the rabid dog they’d both played at being, back when their identities had been only  _ pain  _ and  _ servitude.  _ Begging for scraps from the kings they served, getting rewarded with bruised knees and busted lips and never-enough affection. 

“Always.” Ronan confessed around the mouthful of skin and bone between his teeth, and then stilled his hips, coming on a gritty moan that ground his bite until Proko was sure he’d broken skin. 

_ Me too,  _ Proko mouthed, even as Ronan wrapped a calloused hand around him and got him off, too, sweat-slick and aching. Even though Ronan meant someone else entirely. 

*** 

“Nothing feels real anymore,” K murmured, half-delirious, still dressed in the same clothes he’d worn when they’d met last. The  _ K  _ tattooed onto the knobby curve where his right ulna met his wrist was lurid and  _ red,  _ redder than it seemed last time, when Proko had first noticed it. He was paler; maybe that was why it seemed more stark. 

He stepped close and touched Proko’s cheekbone with feathery fingertips, and Proko wished he’d been struck, instead. Wished for anything but the ecstacy of K’s touch, his creator’s skin upon his. 

“Come home to me,” K breathed against his mouth, sharing his breath. There was nothing but this, K all he could see or smell or feel or hear. K, overwhelming him. “Come home, Proko.” 

Proko didn’t answer, only allowed himself to be touched for just a moment more, slipping out of K’s grasp like smoke. He had class in twenty minutes. He had to  _ go.  _ If he stayed any longer he’d stay forever, caught and held. He had to go now, while he still remembered why that was a bad thing. 

***

“You know I want you.” Ronan murmured lowly, stretched out on his front in Adam’s bed, sheets tangled up around his feet, all of him pale and naked, carved like a statue of some Greek god with a masterpiece of writhing terror and beauty inked on his marble flesh. “Always.” He was making more of a statement with his presence than in the words he spoke without even looking at Adam head on. He’d come all the way to D.C., broken into Adam’s apartment, and now was here with a trail of black clothes like breadcrumbs leading to where he lay like a sacrifice upon Adam’s bed. 

“You hate me for leaving,” Adam countered, but stepped close enough to cup a hand around Ronan’s calf, thumb digging in to the tense muscle until it softened, relaxed beneath his firm grip. 

_ “Odi et amo; quare fortasse requiris, nescio, sed fieri sentio et excuricior.”  _ Ronan quoted, voice like roughened silk.  _ I hate and I love; you may ask why I do this, but I do not know. I feel and I am tormented.  _

“Not the Catullus I’d have thought you’d use, naked in my bed.” Adam commented, and felt fondness spread through his chest like warmed up honey dripping over his bones. 

Ronan hid his easy smile in his bicep, amused. “What would you have picked, then, Parrish?” He cajoled, flirting, and Adam smiled too, where Ronan couldn’t see, leaning down to press that smile to the back of Ronan’s left knee. 

_ “Da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum…”  _ Between each word he kissed another inch up Ronan’s skin, nipping at the sweet curve beneath the swell of his ass. 

“You’re gonna shake me into confusion?” Ronan goaded, breathless, and opened his thighs, easier than he ever had when he’d been seventeen and like broken glass, sharp enough around the edges to cut. 

“Oh, Ronan.” Adam said, long-suffering, and then did not speak for a long time, the moonlight streaming into the room, spilling across the bed. He’d be tired in the morning when he had to get up to go to work, but he’d have been tired anyway, and at least now he’d be in a good mood. 

***

“Madame President, the Speaker of the House is in the Mural Room.” Adam said, stepping into the Oval Office and giving the rambling diplomat he’d just interrupted a placid sort of smile, ten times better than the one he’d used at Aglionby. 

“Thank you, Adam.” President Gansey said with a flash of her pearl-white teeth, the picture of power and grace from her seat behind the Resolute desk. 

“Of course, ma’am,” he nodded, and strode back out, ushering the diplomat along with him and dodging the man’s attempts at flattering his way into a second meeting. 

He’d been back at his own desk for hardly half an hour before Gansey called. This did not surprise him, because after spending so many years entrenched in the familial politics of 300 Fox Way, Gansey seemed to have developed a kind of supernatural ability to know when Adam was making suspect life decisions. 

“Adam, old sport!” Gansey bellowed down the line, calling from a SAT phone in the middle of the Himalayas. The wind whistled from his end like an oncoming train. In the background, someone was yelling in heavily-accented Dzongkha. It sounded like Blue. Adam pictured the scene, Blue in a heavy parka with faux fur lining its hood yelling at one of the people she was organizing, Henry off playing a game of Gin Rummy with the local children, Gansey smiling and playing the role of the Good Doctor, saving the world one vaccination at a time. It made him feel terribly homesick, though he’d never been on one of their globetrotting adventures. “How are you? How’s Mother?” 

Adam sighed, and removed his reading glasses, closing his eyes and kneading at the tension that had collected at his brow. “She’s fine. I’m fine.” 

_ “Adam,” _ Gansey said, somehow grave and jolly all at once, reproving and paternal and so  _ Gansey  _ that Adam’s homesickness crested, threatening to spill over. 

“Ronan is in town.” Adam confessed, trying for neutrality and failing miserably. 

“Is he.” Gansey said, not a question, sounding exactly zero percent surprised. Adam sighed again, and squinted down at the papers he was reading. Some do-gooder bill that wouldn’t ever get passed in a million years. 

“Yes.” Adam said, and thought about saying  _ where is the closest airport to you? I will be there before the week is out.  _ He didn’t, though. “How’s Everest?” 

***

K was as much a prince as Dick Gansey had ever been, as Ronan Lynch had ever been, the son of a king. There were many types of kings, and so there were many types of princes, though they all shared a thirst for greatness and rebellion, an abhorrence for anonymity and the mundane. 

Proko was no prince. He could not even fake it, play at being one like Parrish always could. He was a wraith, a spectre, a ghost without a home to haunt. A ghost with no grave. 

( _ Where was I buried?  _ He wanted to ask K, every time they fucked, like it was some sweet nothing, a snatch of porno-style dirty talk. Every time K put it in, every time he bottomed out into Proko’s yielding body, Proko could feel the words, wanting to batter their way free.) 

K was a king, now, something that he could not have ever imagined when they’d been children and he’d played at running things. He was a king who didn’t need to shout his power from the rooftops. It echoed in his footsteps. 

A king. 

And now here he was again, calling Proko to raise up the banners. Kneel and swear fealty again. 

(And Proko wished, oh how he wished, that he didn’t want to heed the call and  _ go.)  _

He was fucking up; he couldn’t pay attention to life in front of him when all there was in his mind was  _ K,  _ who would not let him be. Who had found him again, remembered him again, like he was some toy that had been outgrown but was still jealously guarded against being played with by any one else. K was like that, clutching him close, but he was like a dragon too, hoarding up all his treasures and keeping them under lock and key. He wanted Proko, and he was Joseph Kavinsky, and his father was dead, really dead, and the forgery of his father was dead, too, the placeholder taken away so he could  _ rule.  _

He couldn’t teach, couldn’t lecture, cancelled all the classes he feasibly could and then had his students reading endless pages of Botev when he could not, combing through each and every line of  _ To My First Love  _ as if it could give him the answers he sought, as if it would tell him what he should do or how he should feel. His graduate assistants tried to ply him with cabbage and hashish, all of them worried over his sudden change in behavior. Even food had no taste, not in comparison to the taste of K’s skin. His veins itched as if he was jonesing for a hit. He was being unmade by this, unraveling from the person he’d forged for himself to live inside of and becoming the person K had invented, had Dreamt up. It had been so easy to forget the magic of the world, to forget that he himself was magic, when he’d drawn the mundane around himself like a cloak of thorns to keep out the extraordinary that had broken his heart so thoroughly. 

His ancient answering machine blinked with two new messages: one from the Dean, no doubt to call him in for a scolding and a warning,  _ you are not tenured, Dr. Prokopenko, and would do well to remember this when cancelling your classes,  _ and one from K, no doubt to obfuscate and purr and command. 

He thought of running, and knew it was hopeless. 

(You couldn’t run away if you didn’t want to get away in the first place.) 

***

Ronan was still at his apartment when he got back, exhausted from a full day of meetings and press conferences and motorcades. He was making omelets in his black boxer-briefs like some kind of x-rated housekeeper; Adam hadn’t ever known him to cook so much as a microwave Poptart, and was ninety-seven percent sure he’d not had eggs in the fridge when he’d left that morning. 

“Who are you,” Adam said, stepping up behind him and hooking his chin over Ronan’s shoulder. “And what have you done with Ronan Lynch?” 

Ronan didn’t respond except to press his hips back against Adam’s, again mostly-naked while Adam still wore his suit, rumpled from a fourteen hour work day. His eye-roll was very nearly audible. He moved deliberately, keeping Adam wound around him, to scrape the omelets off onto two plates already loaded with green peppers and mushrooms that had been fried up in something that smelled like heaven. Much better than the cold Chinese takeout he had been planning to eat for dinner before passing out for five hours of restless sleep. 

“Blow me, Parrish.” He mumbled, and then they ate the food on Adam’s couch with  _ the West Wing _ playing on the television because it was the only thing they could both agree on. 

Ronan dragged him to bed afterwards and blew  _ him  _ instead, twining their bodies together until the few places that they  _ weren’t  _ touching were negligible. Adam slept like that, better than he had in what felt like years. Since they’d been teenagers, probably, post-coital in a single bed above St. Agnes Cathedral. 

It did nothing to quell the nervous hope in his chest, nor the terrible adoration thick in his throat. 

***

“I fucked Lynch,” Proko said, sitting across from K in a fancy restaurant whose name wasn’t even displayed on the outside, the kind of place that you got into on your name and your black card. More exclusive than some state universities. Around them, CEOs and senators and gangsters and trophy wives conversed. Proko felt like Oliver Twist, clothed in the ragged uniform of the poverty-stricken liberal arts academic. At the other side of the table, K was all crisp lines and ten thousand dollar suit, black on black on black. A shadow, a devil, a king. 

K blinked, cocked his head, took in Proko like a jaguar might survey a gazelle dripping blood right under its nose. He was like that, a predator on its prey. He’d always looked at Proko like that. It shouldn’t have felt like a comfort, but it did. 

“Was he any good?” K asked, as measured as he might inquire about a vintage off of the wine menu. He cut another piece off his steak and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly as he waited for a reply, seeming genuinely curious. 

“That’s- I-” Proko stammered, and swallowed to get himself under control. K kept on eating his five hundred dollar steak. Waiting, like he had all the time in the world. That there could be two Joseph Kavinskys, one desperate to touch and hurry things along, the other patient as a saint, should have frightened Proko more than it did. “He was. Good. And he’s not the only one. I’ve fucked a lot of people.” 

“So have I,” K shrugged, eyes bright. “That’s over now, though.” Confident, like he was so sure that Proko would say  _ yes  _ to anything he proposed. 

Damn him, but Proko would. This was the last weapon he had, carnal knowledge of Ronan Lynch and dozens of others, all the men who had bent him in half and fucked him until he saw stars, and none of them coming close to what K could do to him with half a word and the back of his hand. 

“What are you asking.” He said, almost not wanting to hear the answer. Not wanting to hear it, because he did not want to say  _ yes, anything.  _ But he would. 

“Not asking.” K shrugged, and took a casual sip from his wine glass. He’d ordered a whole bottle of Buty. The waiter had evidently approved. “Proposing.” 

“Proposing.” Proko repeated, squinting at him like he was some old woman, K’s Baba Svelenia who Proko could remember only because it was one of the things K had pressed into his head when he was creating him, sweet as taffy to go with all the sour nightmares he pressed in there, too. 

“I need someone to… run the house.” K said, and kept his gaze on his steak, cutting it into perfectly-sized squares. “My house.” 

“Run… the house.” Proko repeated, feeling dumb with it. “I don’t know how to run a washing machine.”  _ All I know how to do is read and fuck,  _ he couldn’t say, but meant to his marrow. 

K’s mouth curved up a little at the corners. He looked hungry. Like he’d been starving for so long he forgot how to be sated. “I’ll hire people to do it all. Come home with me, Proko.” 

_ Drop everything, Proko, and step back into the lion’s den,  _ K was saying.  _ Let me devour you. Be mine. No one else’s. Not even yourself.  _

Proko thought about saying  _ no.  _ Thought about saying  _ I never want to see you again.  _ Maybe  _ I got out once, I’m not getting back in.  _

“Okay.” He said instead, and reached out beneath the table to knock their ankles together. “Okay, Joey.”  _ I surrender.  _

K smiled, almost as joyful as a boy except for how sharp his teeth seemed. 

Proko’s heart swelled with happiness, even as his stomach dropped in dread. 

***

“We ever gonna talk about this?” Adam asked, eyes closed and whole body aching in a different way than it usually ached. His thighs felt like Jell-O. He was sure there was a tennis ball sized hickey blackening on his jawline. He’d have to either borrow some makeup from the media department or maybe try to futilely grow his stubble out to cover it. 

Ronan groaned, expressive and hoarse, into Adam’s right armpit. 

“Can we just not.” 

_ “Ronan.”  _ Adam said, doing his best impression of someone’s mother. Not either of their own mothers, or Gansey’s, or Blue’s. Definitely not Henry’s. Possibly a mythical kind of mother, one who didn’t actually exist anywhere except television and fairytales. A supernatural creature made up of starch and snickerdoodle cookies. 

_ “Adam.”  _ Ronan parroted, but rolled so he was propped on his elbows, their chests pressed together and Ronan so close that Adam couldn’t see anything but the icy azure of his irises, the blown out size of his endlessly obsidian pupils. 

“I’m here.” Ronan said, all intensity. “I’m  _ here, _ Adam.” 

They’d tried being apart. Tried being  _ Ronan  _ and  _ Adam,  _ instead of  _ Ronan and Adam.  _ Tried to forget, tried to live their own lives. 

Adam thought about work, and how exhausted he was, and how often he imagined jumping on a plane to get  _ away  _ before Ronan had reappeared in his life, his apartment, his bed. He’d not imagined running off since that night, with the moonlight on Ronan’s skin and Latin love poems on his lips like silvery laments. 

He didn’t care about the catalyst. Didn’t care about the fingerprint bruises that were fading to nothing on Ronan’s skin, fingerprints that were not his own. Didn’t care about anything but  _ this,  _ Ronan having dinner waiting when he got home, the promise of Ronan’s body in his bed at night, twined around him. The promise of  _ Ronan.  _

“Well,” he said, and twined his fingers in Ronan’s short hair, pressing their lips together, their teeth bumping when he spoke. “If you’re already  _ here…”  _

***

_ it’s a strange way of saying that i know ‘i’m supposed to love you’ _

_ i’m supposed to love you _

***

_ Somewhere in Bhutan _

“Oh, good.” Gansey sighed, half-asleep, into the nape of Henry’s neck. At his back, Blue snuffled, her elbow in one of his kidneys. Their three sleeping bags had been zipped together to create one giant sleeping bag, as was their penchant on tent excursions. 

“Hmm?” Blue mumbled, barely-audible over Henry’s buzzsaw impression. 

“Gonna have to send a card.” He yawned, and buried his face further into Henry’s hair, which smelled like the campfire they’d used to cook their dinner and dry shampoo. 

“Shhh,” Henry groaned. “Sleep, babe.” He patted clumsily at Gansey’s cheek, an attempt at soothing.  

“‘Kay,” Gansey said, and did. 

***

_ let me make you happy _ _  
_ _ i wanna make you feel alive _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
